How To Optimize Your Sales Funnel (Part 2): Prioritize Where to Test In Your Funnel

In our previous postabout optimizing your sales funnel through testing, we talked about the importance of collecting data. Once you ensure you are tracking adequate data on your pages, you need to prioritize where to run your tests. When it comes to testing, one of the unfortunate facts is that you just cannot test everything at once without skewing your results.

Let’s say that Step 1 of your sales funnel is your lead capture page and Step 2 is your sales page, and you decided to test both steps at the same time (see diagram below). If your sales increased by 10%, which test can you really attribute the increase to?

Split testing confusing. Example of cross pollination.

Did an increase in leads generate more sales? Did an improvement in the sales page itself produce the sale? Is there a combination of variations that produce more sales when they interact with each other?

You just cannot definitively know.

This is called “cross-pollination,” and when starting out with testing, it’s something that you ideally try to avoid. When beginning to plan your tests, you need to look at the data that you have been gathering from your tracking tools to identify what the high-priority weak spots of your sales funnel are.

It’s often good to start at the top of the funnel. If visitors are not making it past Step 1 of your funnel, they are not ever going to see Step 2, Step 3, Step 4 and so on. So in this scenario, your sales funnel is “clogged,” and Step 1 should be the first place you look at to optimize your funnel.

If Step 1 is performing well, however, but Step 2 is performing poorly, then begin with Step 2.

The bottom line is that you should use your data to paint a mental picture of what is going on within your funnel from a 1,000-foot view.

Once you have a better understanding of where you would like to see improvement in your sales funnel, then you can focus on what exactly it is you will be testing.

In our next blog, we’ll focus on identifying metrics and objectives for your tests and why this is the most important part when it comes to optimizing your sales funnel.